Super Amy

As I’ve mentioned here before, Mandy and I share a fascination with systems of organization. Around this time last year, I bought a Franklin Covey planning system — desk-sized ring bound planner with two pages a day. It was really relieving to have so much space for schedules, to-do lists, and notes, but admittedly I never used every square inch of it. I run out of pages at the end of June, and while organizational supplies rank pretty highly on my list of worth-the-price-tag items, Franklin Covey’s refills are at least enough to make me look around for some other options.

So, lo and behold the lovely DIYplanner.com, which is designed almost entirely for organizational addicts such as myself! They offer lots of free printable planner pages and the like, as well as ideas and tutorials to help with defining your own perfect planning system. Right now, I’ve created a makeshift “hipster PDA,” which is basically just a stack of printed index cards held together with a binder clip. It appeals to me for several reasons: I love the actual “DIY” nature of it; it fits very comfortably in a handbag, and it’s super-cheap and customizable. Two things that will take some getting used to: not nearly as much writing space as I’m used to, and the binder clip doesn’t make it easy to flip to what I want. We’ll see if it sticks.

I’m worried that starting with all of the geeky things first might be a little too much, too soon? I hope not.

Sometimes, when people are riding in my car, they like to flip through the music on my iPod. It struck me how often this happens, and people say things like “(x) is such a great band!” or “oh, you listen to (y)?”, only to realize that no, I’ve actually never heard band (x) OR band (y) before in my life, regardless of how many days / months / years it has been a part of my musical collection. I always gather music from sources or people, fully intending to give it a good listen. But as technology has advanced and data storage / transfer methods have gotten more complicated, this sometimes means hours of music at once, and well — the “listening’ phase often never happens. So I’ve planned a solution: The great iPod listen of 2009.

My iTunes library currently holds 10,214 songs. I created a playlist which included every single one, set it to shuffle, and voila — the ultimate playlist for listening to everything I have. A challenge, yes, but hey — I figured if I have 22 songs less than ten seconds each, then this is totally do-able. (A second check revealed 39 songs longer than 12 minutes. I guess you win some, you lose some.) The plan is to play the entire list, from beginning to end, without skipping tracks at any point. I keep the iPod in my car, so it’s playing pretty regularly. So far, so good. It’s only been four or five days, and I’m still only 120 songs into it, but I’ve already found a few surprises hiding in the batch. There was one particularly unfortunate incident as I was returning from Greenville on Friday evening — Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant”, the entire punishing live version, took its toll. Don’t get me wrong. I sort of like Arlo Guthrie, in moderation, but you have to believe me when I say that this particular 22 minute song somehow feels much, much longer. Anyway, iTunes tells me I have 27 days’ worth of non-stop music. Eventually I’ll average out how much of that I’m listening to a day — this might turn into the “great iPod listen of 2009 / 2010″ if I don’t set a good pace. Hopefully new-old recommendations are forthcoming.

For coffee lovers, these mugs are fantastic: the Biscuit Lover Mug, and the Lap Mug. Both links courtesy of @citybrew coffee.

listening to: The Innocence Mission – “Some Clear Joy is Coming”

I’ve had Mexico on my mind lately. It might be that the weather is getting warmer, or that all of this rain has turned everything so bright and green, but I very much miss the sounds, the smells, the colors. The taste! Do you think that maybe sometimes a person’s brain subconsciously schedules these things? The beginning of May, both last year and the year before, I spent in SLP. This must just be my internal travel clock sounding an alarm.

You may have noticed a new blog design (and blog post! Hey, hey!). Can I just say, it’s good to have the internet back. After moving in September, we managed to borrow wi-fi from neighbors and coffee shops for a very long while, before finally buckling down and getting our own internet last month. I had mixed feelings at first — what an addictive habit! Without the internet, it turns out that life is actually productive and beautiful, and all it takes is a time-sucking internet connection to kill all of it! But with a little bit of time management, the internet and I have reached a sort of mutual understanding, the result of which is a new template, spurred by a sudden urge to collect and organize my online things (one can get very scattered trying to juggle facebook, twitter, and everything else). I’ve decided to make the transition from Picasa to Flickr. It was a toss-up, to be honest, because I really like Picasa — I like having it linked to my Google account, I like the uploader for the PC, and I had fun mapping my travel photos. Most especially, I like that all of my photos are already there. However, Flickr coordinates better with iPhoto, which is a huge plus since I made the Mac switch. It seems a little quicker with website integration, too (see the new photo badge on the right?), has better community features, provides better copyright protection for art photos, and greets me in a different language every time I visit — shazam! I’m considering splurging for a Pro account, at least for a while, to try and get more of my photos migrated from Picasa. If anyone has tried a Flickr Pro account, I’d love to hear any merits / cons. Is it worth the price?

Crazy things always happen when I don’t blog for a while, and then when I finally get around to a post, I feel obligated to give a quick summary of recent events. So however outdated it may be, I’m going to feed the habit with a (hopefully brief) little update, no matter how redundant it must be for anyone who has spoken with me in, well, months. Work has been as exciting as ever, which means pretty exciting some days and run-of-the-mill on others. I have had my share of new projects to work on, which is always a welcome and delightful challenge, and refreshing when compared to the prospect of writing maintenance code all day long. Because of the glowing state of the US economy, we received some charming announcements back in February, detailing actions the company would take to cut costs and increase cash flow. One of these actions was a mandatory week of furlough, to be taken in March. While I don’t want to make light of a situation which surely caused hardship on people (and let’s not forget that furlough is way better than layoffs), you all know how I feel about vacation time, whether it is paid or not, and also how I feel about impulsive and irresponsible decisions, so I took my week as an opportunity to return to Winchester and Ireland, two of my favorite places in the world. I somehow managed to talk my wonderful sister Mandy into joining me for the second leg of the trip (London / Galway), and you can read a delightful summary of events on her blog. For a brief time between buying the plane ticket and arriving in Winchester, I definitely had a few panicked moments. Have you ever watched a movie or a television show you loved as a child, only to realize that it’s terrible? And it ruins all the good memories you had in the first place? That was my fear. But it turned out to be a wonderful trip. I got to catch up with a lot of friends and see a lot of familiar places, and it honestly felt like I never left. The downside to that is that now I want to go back every month. I’m convinced that in a perfect world, my car would be replaced with a transport device. Anyway, according to the plan, I’ll get another week off in the third and fourth quarters of this year. While my bank account doesn’t suggest anything quite so extravagant as Europe, my head is still swimming with exciting ideas. Mexico? Portland? Kansas? These daydreams are the reasons workplace productivity decreases exponentially after such announcements are made.

Mandy, Brian, and I went to Knoxville, Tennessee in April, to see the wonderful Wilco in concert. I saw them a few years ago in Asheville, and both shows have been among the best I’ve seen. It was my first time visiting Knoxville, and as it turns out, I really like the city. The Tennessee Theatre is beautiful, too. Wilco has a new album coming out soon, and right now you can stream it for free. I haven’t given it a good listen yet, though I love the cover art. They didn’t play any of these new songs at the show (is that normal? I don’t think so), but played plenty of old songs, which are my favorites anyway.

I’ve developed a few new hobbies lately: gardening, pasta dishes, and biking. I have a lovely patch of zinnia seedlings, a couple of poppy plants, and an odd assortment of potted plants littering my porch. I have a delightfully addictive pasta alfredo recipe, and have officially become on occasional work bike-commuter. So – can we call ourselves officially caught up now? Good.

note: Archives links to the left are in a bit of a state at the moment. I’ll fix it soon, I hope. But if we’re honest with ourselves, nobody needs to read any of that, anyway.

Listening: Little Joy